Carlos' Cosmic Bummer

He says all this during a break in the rehearsal, on a patio out back, with his head tilted to the sun and his eyes shaded by his hat. The rest of the guys are scattered around, eating, telling jokes and smoking cigarettes, but Santana sits off to the side, part of the group but separate.

"How's it going at the new pad?" one of the guys asks him.

A few weeks ago, Santana moved into a new home and is living on his own, as a single man, for the first time in more than three decades, surrounded by lots of unpacked boxes.

"Oh, you know, discarding things," he says simply. And then he says, "It feels like an incredible blessing from God, that he's telling me my life is wide open more than ever. The thing I learned is, you have to go through the darkest night of the soul to get to the brightest light of the day, and that's what I did last year."

He frowns, and suddenly says, "I'm still not out of it." Then, without further explanation, he stands up, says, "I better go play," and heads back inside, back to the music that has sustained and protected him for so long.

As a kid, before moving to San Francisco and earning a living as a dishwasher and then starting a band and becoming the Santana of Santana, he lived for a while in Tijuana, Mexico, with his father, Jose, a mariachi violinist, his mother and his six siblings. When he was 10, he began to be molested by a friend's father, a trauma that he first revealed in this magazine nine years ago. He married Deborah in 1972, and they lived in a big, open house near the water in San Rafael. It's where he raised his three children, Angelica, 18, Stella, 23, and Salvador, 25, who is now a musician living in Los Angeles. Salvador remembers the parental drug lecture he got when his folks found out he'd been smoking weed. "My dad: 'Sal, you can't be doing that, your mom's going to get mad.' Then she'd leave the room and he'd say, 'If you want to smoke, smoke with me.' That kind of stuff. We clashed the most in high school. One time, just to piss him off, I told him I was an atheist. That really got to him."

Now, with his children grown and his wife no longer his wife, Santana lives up a hill in a small, affluent town overlooking San Francisco Bay, in a house with a sweeping view of the bays and bridges down below. He meditates here. He also plays the guitar here, usually playing to no one but himself, and it's OK. One evening at the place, the sun is streaming in, illuminating Santana in his chair. He sips a 7-Up and says, "I like the other house because of the incredible soulful, wonderful memories of the children. It had all the pictures of everybody growing up, and you hear the sound in each picture, of that day, the children's glee and everything. But I like it better, this house. As you can tell from every room, it's like my life right now, wide open. There's no obstructions, no guilt, or shame, or condemnation. There's still pain. Thirty-four years. And I miss my friend. But I can't go into it, because I'm into honoring and respecting a person's choice."

He pauses for a long while and takes a deep breath. "There were seven times," he goes on, "seven times when suicide was knocking. It got to the point where I really thought that death would be sweeter than the pain. But each time I would go light up a candle, and I'm still hearing all this inner stuff, a thousand voices screaming at you, accusing you, like, 'You're the lowest, you're not worthy of anything or anyone around you.' But then I would look at a picture of Jesus and say, 'Help me,' and then, very clearly, inwardly, I would hear this one voice that's softer and louder than all the others, and it would say, 'I am sitting next to you. Isn't that enough?' Once I heard that voice, something would shift, and I'd be able to find joy again in food and breathing."